Application Monitoring

When my son was about 6 years old, he spent some time watching Home Shopping Network at his grandmother’s house. A little later he announced that, for his next birthday, he wanted a Burmese Ruby in a Marquise Cut. I hated to disappoint him, but he ended up with a big box of Legos instead.

A large banking customer of ours recently characterized RTView as a bit like the proverbial hidden gem — concealed amidst a big box of Legos: myriad monitoring tools and home grown solutions that have proliferated in order to track their critical, big-money applications.

This customer – a director of application monitoring and management – spoke of the challenges of keeping their large estate of applications running and listed all the monitoring tools they were using, IBM Tivoli, HP BSM, Wily, ITRS, Ganglia, SolarWinds, OEM, you name it. After a while I stopped him and said “With all these tools you have, why are you even talking to me about expanding your use of RTView? Sounds like you have everything you need already.”

His response was quite telling. “Oh, no.” he said. “We love RTView. RTView is extremely useful to us. We couldn’t live without it.” I had to ask — “Why is that? What is so different about RTView?”

He said “Those other tools are primarily for operations people, or strictly for development work. RTView is different. It’s really useful for business unit workgroups who have tens or hundreds of applications they build and manage themselves and need to monitor carefully.”

That’s right, “tens or hundreds” of custom applications built and managed by business workgroups. This is becoming more and more common. And these increasingly sophisticated workgroups that use multiple supporting technologies, such as messaging or caching, need to have control of their own destiny. They cannot depend on the limited and restricted information that is controlled by the IT Ops groups that manage the basic infrastructure and provide only Level 1 support. They need more detailed information to help them analyze and manage the health of the complex applications they assembled and are responsible for.

“New instances of RTView are quickly stood up,” he said, continuing. “We can release and deploy significantly faster with RTView than with any of those other products. It would take months to do in our Global Command Center what we can do with RTView in a few days. A lot of what you have in RTView is turnkey, but it is also easily edited. We can quickly make the custom views that we need for our applications.”

RTView is capable of collecting data from many different sources using its own monitoring and custom adapters, of course. However, it is also very capable of integrating with all those other monitoring tools that may already be in the environment, both pushing data and alerts out to them, or importing data from them in order to paint a complete picture of an application’s health state.

For application support groups, having real-time visibility is often the hidden gem needed to keep your “tens or hundreds” of custom applications running at peak availability and with maximum throughput.

I’ve written a few other blogs that you might find useful in getting to the bottom of Application Monitoring. Enterprise Application Monitoring: The Business Value describes some of the not-so-obvious ways in which real-time visibility into applications unlocks real business value. RTView for TIBCO – More Than APM discusses how RTView augments the basic monitoring capabilities provided by TIBCO, and how it can correlate information from multiple TIBCO and non-TIBCO components, such as Oracle WebLogic or IBM WebSphere.

I also want to remind folks that SL Corporation will be a Platinum Sponsor of the upcoming TIBCO NOW Conference in San Francisco, November 3-5, 2014. Visit our web site, www.sl.com, to learn more about our presence there and what RTView is all about.